THE PATHOS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.

MR. J. W. MA.OKATL, "sometime Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford," has certainly a very happy gift for so rendering some of the most simple and striking of the narratives of the Old Testament as to fit them for the reading of children without that admixture of violent and not unfreeuently even revolting detail which is needful to mark

for elder readers the general characteristics of the times, often even appallingly brutal, of which these special traditions were the purifying salt. In his " Biblia Innocentium ; being the Story of God's Chosen People before the Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ upon Earth, written anew for Children,"* Mr. Mackail has embodied a great deal of the beauty, sim- plicity, and awful impressiveness of the Old Testament without giving too much prominence to the superfluously startling features of those rude and barbarous times, which are certainly not suited for the reading of young children in our own day. But Mr. Maokail has, we think, oftener failed to preserve the characteristic pathos of the Old Testament narratives than any other of their most remarkable aspects. That pathos consists chiefly, we think, in the strange mixture of unconquerable pertinacity and Oriental submissiveness with which the Israelites encountered the severer blows inflicted upon them by God's Providence.

They met these blows as though the supernatural Power they worshipped at once gave the most attentive hearing to all their arguments and appeals, and yet, when it overruled

them, was absolutely irresistible and unalterable. This is the pertinacity which expresses itself so pathetically in Abraham's pleading with God to save Sodom if fifty, or forty-five or forty or thirty or twenty, or even ten, righteous men should be found in the city. That pleading Mr. Mackail gives with all the impressive effect of that confident insistence which underlies its grave submissiveness to God's will. But in many other cases where the same characteristic is quite as striking in its patient audacity and its ultimate submissiveness, Mr. Mackail either misses, or greatly curtails and condenses it, to the serious injury of the story. For

example, take the account of David's pleading with God for the life of Bathsheba's first child. Here is Mr. Mackail's version :—

" Then the child that had been born to David and Bathsheba fell ill; and David fasted and lay all night on the ground, and would not taste food or listen to his councillors. On the seventh day the child died. David's servants were afraid to tell him ; but when he saw them whispering together, he asked, Is the child dead ? ' and they said, Yes.' Then he rose and washed himself and ate bread. They asked him, 'How is it that you fasted and wept for the child while it was alive, but rose and ate bread when it died ? ' and he answered them, 'While the child was yet alive, I fasted and wept, for I said, Who can tell whether God will be pitiful to me, that the child may live P But now he is dead, why should I fast ? can I bring him back again ? I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me.' " Now, that misses in the first place Nathan's prophecy to David that "the child that is born unto you shall surely die."

Yet this was essential to bring out the reverent pertinacity of David in entreating God for the child's recovery in the very face of Nathan's prophecy. Moreover, Mr. Maokail unduly reduces the emphasis with which David seeks to change God's decree by showing his own changed heart and willing.. nese to suffer in the child's place if thereby he might perhaps fulfil God's purpose as well as by the death of the child. "David therefore besought God for the child, and David

fasted and went in and lay all night upon the earth. And the elders of his house went to him to raise him up from the earth ; but be would not, neither did he eat bread with them." That is much more graphic than Mr. Mackail's first sentence, and pictures far more powerfully the clinging of David to the hope that he might yet effect God's purpose without the death of the child. Mr. Mackail misses also the mistake of David's counsellors in misinterpreting his pertinacity. They said: "Behold while the child was yet alive, we spake unto him, and be would not hearken unto our voice : how will he then vex himself if we tell him that the child is dead ?" All this Mr. Mackail omits ; yet it was essential to bring out the true pathos of David's prayer. It was for the child's life he was wrestling, not for his own peace of mind. So soon as he was satisfied that the child could not be saved, whatever his own willingness to suffer, he wrestled no longer. And here, again, Mr. Mackail misses a most pathetic touch. He not only "washed and anointed himself and changed his apparel," but before he took food again "he came into the house of the Lord and worshipped." It was not that he was

so set on his own petition that he was sullen when God would not grant it. On the contrary, when he found that no change

in him could avert God's will, he bowed to that divine will at once and strove to suppress even that agony of desire which was

* Published by Reeves and Turner.

inconsistent with it. We are surprised at Mr. Mackail's missing this most characteristic and pathetic feature of the story, which shows that it was not self-will which actuated David, but the pathetic hope that what God sought to effect was a change in his own heart to be brought about by the death of the child if in no other way, but perhaps also by his own humility and penitence. But that his heart was not turned from God by the rejection of his prayer, we know, because his first act was to worship him before even he returned again to his ordinary mode of life.

But perhaps the instance in which Mr. Mackail has most completely missed the profound pathos of the almost irre- sistible pertinacity with which the Hebrew people attributed to God's inspiration the depth of their own love, is in the story of "The Lady of Shunem," to whom Elisha gave a son,—a story which, as it appears to us, Mr. Mackail has gone very near to spoiling, though it is nearly the most beautiful of all the Hebrew traditions :-

" Elisha passed through Shunem, where there was a great lady, and she made him eat bread at her house ; and afterwards as often as he passed by, he turned in there. Then she said to her hus- band, ' This is a holy man ; let us make a little chamber on the wall, and furnish it for him with a bed and a table and a stool and a candlestick, that he may lie there whenever he comes to us.' Elisha wished to make her some return for her kindness; and first he asked her, 'Shall I speak for you to the king?' But she said, I am content to live here among my own people.' Then he found that the one thing she desired was a child, for she had none; so he called her and said, ' Within a year you shall hold a son in your arms.' The next year she bore a son. When her child was big enough to walk alone, he went out one day in har- vest time among the reapers. The heat of the sun made him ill, :and he cried to his father, 'My head, my head.' A lad carried him back to the house to his mother ; and he sat on her lap in the house till noon, and then died. She took her dead child up and laid him on Elisha's bed, and wont out, shutting the duor behind ;her; then she told a servant to saddle an ass, and rode across the plain through the heat of the day without slacking, till she came to Elisha's house on Mount Carmel; and there she fell at his feet, crying, ' Did I ask a son of you, my lord P' Elisha rose and rode back with her, and went up to the little room on the wall where the dead child was lying on his bed. He went in and shut the door and prayed to God, and then bowed himself over the child, putting his mouth upon his mouth, and his eyes upon his eyes, and his hands upon his hands ; and the child grow warm, and sneezed seven times, and opened his eyes. Then Elisha called the mother, who came and fell at his feet, and took her child alive and well from his hands."

There Mr. Mackail misses almost every characteristic feature of the Shunamite lady's stately reserve and pertinacious belief that the prophet who had given her her son, could alone restore him, and if clung to, would do so. She does not, as Mr. Mackail says, order the servant to saddle the ass,—on the

contrary, she goes to her husband and requests him to give the order, but with perfect composure, and says not a word of her child's death, though he asks her wherefore she wished to go to Elisha on that day, as it was neither new moon nor sabbath ; and she answers only, " It shall Jae well." Then, as she approaches in her haste Elisha's house on Mount Carmel, the prophet sends his servant to

ask, "Is it well with thee P is it well with thy husband P is it well with the child P And she answered, It is well ; "-

partly, no doubt, because she held any misfortune which God had sent, to be well ; perhaps even more because she was .determined not to be put off with the prophet's servant when she wanted the prophet himself. All this Mr. Maas:ill simply omits ; yet this answer is perhaps the most pathetic evidence of the faith and pertinacity of both human and spiritual love, in the whole compass of the Old Testament. When she reaches the prophet she .catches him by the feet, and Gehazi tries to thrust her away, but is rebuked by his master. Then she expostulates with Elisha for giving her a son only to deceive her hopes ; and he bids Gehazi gird up his loins and go his way. "If thou meet any man, salute him not; and if any salute thee, answer him not again : and lay my staff upon the face of the child." • 1 And the mother of the child said, As the Lord liveth, and as my soul liveth, I will not leave thee. Then he came and followed her." She never even tells Elisha that her child is dead. She only clings to him who promised her the child, and who alone, as she believed, could truly interpret God's purpose for her. And she was right; Gehazi with his master's staff effected nothing. " There was neither voice nor hearing." Then Elisha himself comes with her, and discovers what the Shunamite had never told him, that 4' the child was dead "and avas laid upon the prophet's bed ; and after restoring him to life, he sends for the woman to take up her son. " Then she went in, and fell at his feet, and bowed herself to the ground, and took up her son and went out." Surely Mr. Mackail has completely missed the wonderful and statuesque beauty of this story,—the stately reserve of the mother, her passionate confidence in Elisha, her utter disbelief that the prophet's servant had any power to meet the extremity of her need, her unwillingness to waste words in even describing her calamity when she so urgently needed the prophet's presence, and the pertinacity of her conviction that if she could but gain that, he who had promised her her unexpected blessing and had fulfilled his promise, could restore it even after it had apparently been taken away by God. In this story there are all the essential features of that character which so strangely qualified the Hebrew people to hold fast the promises of Revelation when God had once given them; which made them so tenacious and so confident of divine gifts and grace, and so pathetically willing even to resign their hopes, when once they had fully satisfied themselves, —though on that point it was not easy to satisfy them, —that God really meant to withdraw what he had given. Mr. Mackail's book is full of simplicity and beauty, but he cer- tainly often omits what seems to us the most characteristic element in the strange pathos of Hebrew love and resigna- tion,—that which made Eli say, even when judgment was prophesied on his sons, " It is the Lord, let him do what seemeth to him good ;" yet which, in the stronger natures of that race, did not discourage them from holding familiar con- troversy with the Lord, whenever they discerned, or thought they discerned, that they could interpret his purposes better by purifying, but still clinging to, their own.